I'm assuming nintendo had to work out different deals with different exclusive/general agents per country in Europe (if they didn't handle things directly in some country/countries), so the european launch should've been accordingly fragmented with different schedules. Maybe that's part of the reason? The general agent for Sweden was (still is?) Bergsala AB. Don't know details about other countries, i'm afraid.

Yeah it's weird, some PAL consoles have diodes on the controller port and some don't.

This is super weird.

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I'm assuming nintendo had to work out different deals with different exclusive/general agents per country in Europe (if they didn't handle things directly in some country/countries), so the european launch should've been accordingly fragmented with different schedules. Maybe that's part of the reason? The general agent for Sweden was (still is?) Bergsala AB. Don't know details about other countries, i'm afraid.

Both Sweden and Spain are in PAL-B region, so that's not the reason. Only Italy and the UK are in PAL-A region (along with non-european PAL countries such as New Zealand I guess ?).

However, just as weird, even though it was a sparsely populated country Sweden actually got games that other PAL-B countries didn't get, Gimmick comes to mind.

So, there's a discrepancy between official PAL regions and actual local variations. I know Bergsala AB (who had the exclusive import rights here) had a say what games made it to scandinavia (hence, we got localized versions of shadowgate, de ja vu), mr. gimmick being an example. Generally, they selected games already localized to english, though.

A side effect is that there wasn't that many four scores around (I got a satellite back in the day) so post-market access to fourscores mostly means imports from germany, and these doesn't work with scandinavian controllers because of mentioned reasons.

I always thought it was for the same reasons games where region protected by a lockout chip (so that you can't import games out of your region and avoid expensive local sellers). But then again the main reason for the lockout chip was made, seems to have been first and foremost to protect Nintendo from unlicensed games.

FrankenGraphics wrote:

So, there's a discrepancy between official PAL regions and actual local variations.

Yes Bergsala AB was first in Europe to distribute the NES I heard, they had been successfully releasing Game & Watch games in Sweden and now wanted to import the Famicom, but Nintendo wouldn't let them until it was tested in USA or so I think. So we got the earliest PAL NESes in Scandinavia (but later than USA). Then some company called Mattel, distributed a NES in certain countries (UK, Italy, Australia and New Zealand among others I think), these had a different lockout chip than Bergsala's PAL NES so the games where incompatible. At some point later the PAL NES was distributed in Germany and other European countries by some company I assume later became Nintendo of Europe (at least the current NOE is located in Germany I think). I think they used the same lockout chip as the Scandinavian version, but they added these diodes on the controller port and also made sure the power supply was incompatible with the Scandinavian one for some reason (these Neses usually has a blue area around the power plug port I think).

So in short there are at least three different types of PAL NES (which one of them is only compatible with its own controllers) and two different PAL lockout chips. But for the CPU and PPU I think they all use the same? It's only the lockout, controllers and power supply that may differ.

Quote:

I know Bergsala AB (who had the exclusive import rights here) had a say what games made it to scandinavia (hence, we got localized versions of shadowgate, de ja vu), mr. gimmick being an example. Generally, they selected games already localized to english, though.

Yeah Bergsala translated the manuals and certain games like Shadowgate and Deja Vu to Swedish, but the games they could release were limited to what Nintendo of Japan allowed to be released in Europe. Bergsala claims that to this date they have always released every game that were available to them, I guess this is why we somehow got games like Mr Gimmick even though it was cancelled even in America. I remember that I wanted to play Final Fantasy games and Bergsala said they'd definitely release FF VI in Sweden as soon as a PAL release was available, but Nintendo of Europe in Germany wasn't interested so we never got it. Those bastards!

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